Opinion: Rubio showed the GOP is serious about immigration and Latino outreach

After watching the president’s State of the Union speech, I’m beginning to wonder how serious Latinos are about immigration reform. Surely for those who are out of status this is serious business, but the game seems less about fixing immigration and more about fixing to get over on the GOP. Latinos want solutions, not partisanship, but the immigration issue seems all too tempting for Democrats to capitalize on even at the expense of Latinos.

For the first time, an official response to the president’s State of the Union Speech was made in English and in Spanish. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida was tagged by party leadership to be the face of the GOP, and it seems as though the tail isn’t wagging the dog so much in the Republican Party lately when it comes to Latinos.

Carlos Mora is an American citizen who wants his dad back, yet in the president’s speech Mr. Obamaonce again boasted about his immigration policy that has systematically ripped families like Carlos’ apart for reasons no Republican president has tried to justify since President Eisenhower.

Of course, one can’t expect this to be appreciated by partisan Latinos who are doing what they can to ignore the president’s policy of forced removal and salivating at the prospect of using immigration to leverage the GOP out of existence. I asked some of these folks when was the last time the official Democrat response to the State of the Union was in English and Spanish? And I remind them that it was a Republican, President Bush, who conducted the first radio address in Spanish more than ten years ago.

That was before the War on Terror, which brought renewed strength to our xenophobic impulses, but it’s time we move forward. While the losing fight by the cultural purists within the Republican Party continues, it is time to confront these racist forces within the GOP so that the party can finally pose a challenge to Democrats who are all too willing to use Latino suffering for electoral gains.

Erika Andiola is a nationally-recognized leader of Dreamers and she was asked by Google to participate in a Google Hangout to ask the president questions about immigration after the State of the Union, but once they discovered that Ms. Andiola’s mother and brother were recently victims of the president’s dragnet, they rescinded the invitation.

Perhaps they were afraid that the Republicans would point out the obvious hypocrisy of putting folks like Ms. Andiola on display when the president’s policies have been targeting her family. Maybe they were also afraid Ms. Andiola would refuse to give the president a pass in questioning his policies, as so many other Latinos have. But without a viable alternative to the Democrats, that’s exactly what we are doing.

Stephen A. Nuño, Ph.D., NBC Latino contributor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. He is currently writing a book on Republican outreach into the Latino Community.